End users often notice slowing down or “degrading” of their personal computers (PCs) over time. One of the most prevalent causes of such performance degradation is applications that are “always on.” Because such applications continuously run, they steadfastly consume significant quantities of input/output (IO), central processing unit (CPU), memory, network and other resources. They may also cause user annoyance by trying to initiate a dialog with the user via system tray balloon tips, pop-up dialog boxes, etc. Common examples of such applications are expired trial versions of software, PC cleanup programs, screen savers bundled with toolbars, etc. A user generally has no way of knowing what kind of impact a given application might have on his or her machine at the time of installation, and also has no way of readily attributing a noticed degradation to a particular cause.
Users who notice PC performance degradation often resort to PC cleanup tools, registry cleanup utilities, anti-virus/antimalware tools, etc., to fix the problem. Such efforts, however, frequently cause further degradation of the system. Many users also resort to more aggressive methods like system restore, restoring a full PC backup, etc., which could potentially lead to loss of applications, data, and/or settings and generally fail to solve the underlying issues.